Acqua Alta

Though it had been years since he had been in her apartment, he found it with little difficulty, on the right side of Calle dello Squero Vecchio, a street so small that the city had never bothered to paint its name on the wall. He rang the bell and, moments later, a voice came through the intercom asking who he was. He was glad they were taking at least this minimum precaution; too often the people of this peaceful city merely clicked open their doors without bothering to learn who was there.

Though the building had been restored within the last few years and the stairwells newly plastered and painted, salt and humidity had already begun their work, devouring the paint and scattering large droppings of it on the floor, like scraps under a table. As he turned into the fourth and final flight of steps, he looked up and saw that the heavy metal door to the apartment was open, held back by Flavia Petrelli. However nervous and strained it was, that actually did seem to be a smile.

They shook hands at the door, and she stepped back to allow him to enter. They spoke at the same time, she saying, ‘I’m glad you came,’ and he, ‘Permesso,’ as he stepped inside.

She wore a black skirt and a low-necked sweater in a canary yellow that few women would risk. Flavia’s olive complexion and nearly black eyes glowed in response to the colour. But on closer inspection he saw that the eyes, however beautiful, were tired, and small lines of tension radiated from her mouth.

She asked for his coat and hung it in a large armadio that stood on the left of the hallway. He had read the report of the officers who responded to the attack, so he couldn’t keep himself from looking down at the floor and at the brick wall. There was no sign of blood, but he could smell strong cleansers and, he thought, wax.

Flavia made no motion to go back into the living room but kept him there and asked, her voice low, ‘Have you found out anything?’

‘About Dottor Semenzato?’

She nodded.

Before he could answer, Brett called out from the living room, ‘Stop plotting, Flavia, and bring him in here.’

She had the grace to smile and shrug, then turned and led him back into the living room. It was as he remembered it, filled, even on this dreary day, with light that filtered in from the six immense skylights cut into the roof. Brett sat, dressed in burgundy slacks and a black turtleneck sweater, on a sofa placed between two tall windows. Brunetti could see that parts of her face, though far less swollen than they had been in the hospital, were still angry blue. She shifted herself to the left, leaving him a space next to her, and extended her hand.

He took her hand and sat beside her, looking at her more closely.

‘No more Frankenstein,’ she said, smiling to show not only that her teeth were free of the wires that had bound them together for most of the time that she was in the hospital, but that the cut on her lip had healed sufficiently for her to be able to close her mouth.

Brunetti, familiar with the assumed omniscience of Italian doctors and their concomitant inflexibility, asked in real surprise, ‘How did you get them to let you out?’

‘I made a scene,’ she said quite simply.

Offered no more than that, Brunetti glanced at Flavia, who covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head at the memory.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘They said I could go if I’d eat, so now my diet has progressed to bananas and yoghurt.’

With the talk of food, Brunetti looked more closely at her and saw that, under the bruises and scrapes, her face was indeed thinner, the lines finer and more angular.

‘You should eat more than that,’ he said. From behind him, he heard Flavia laugh, but when he turned to her, she recalled him to the business at hand by asking, ‘What about Semenzato? We read about it this morning.’

‘It’s pretty much as they wrote. He was killed in his office.’

‘Who found him?’ Brett asked.

‘The cleaning woman.’

‘What happened? How was he killed?’

‘He was hit on the head.’

‘With what?’ asked Flavia.

‘A brick.’

Suddenly curious, Brett asked, ‘What kind of brick?’

Brunetti remembered where he had first seen it, beside the body. ‘It’s dark blue, about twice the size of my hand, but there are some markings on it, in gold.’

‘What was it doing there?’ Brett asked.

‘The cleaning woman said he used it as a paperweight. Why do you want to know?’

She nodded as if in answer to a different question and pushed herself up from the sofa and walked across the room to the bookshelves. Brunetti winced at the gingerly way she walked, at how slowly she raised her arm to pull a thick book down from a high shelf. Tucking it under one arm, she came back towards them and placed the book on the low table that stood in front of the sofa. She flipped it open, riffled through a few pages, then pushed it open and held it there with both palms pressed down on the outer edge of the pages.

Brunetti bent forward and looked at the coloured photo on the page. It appeared to be an immense gate, but all scale was missing because it wasn’t attached to walls of any sort; instead, it stood free in a room, perhaps a museum gallery. Immense winged bulls stood in protective posture on either side of the opening. The background was the same cobalt blue of the brick that had been used to kill Semenzato, the body of the animals the same vibrant gold. A closer look showed him that the wall was entirely constructed of rectangular bricks, the form of the